Gospel Prism

J. I. Packer has this to say about “bereavement,� that form of grief that comes from the loss of a loved one. For those of you who have been through this, I’m sure you can empathize with his words:

Bereavement, we said—meaning the loss through death of someone we loved—brings grief in its most acute and disabling form, and coping with such grief is always a struggle. Bereavement becomes a supreme test of the quality of our faith. Faith, as the divine gift of trust in the triune Creator-Redeemer, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and so as a habit implanted in the Christian heart, is meant to act as our gyroscopic compass throughout life’s voyage and our stabilizer in life’s storms. However, bereavement shakes unbelievers and believers alike to the foundations of their being, and believers no less than others regularly find that the trauma of living through grief is profound and prolonged. The idea, sometimes voiced, that because Christians know death to be for believers the gate of glory, they will therefore not grieve at times of bereavement is inhuman nonsense.

From J. I. Packer, A Grief Sanctified, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), p. 10.

It is nonsense and foolishness to believe Christians should never grieve especially during such heart-wrenching times as this. If Christians were to be devoid of human emotion, then the books of Job and the Psalms should be torn out of the Bible because the emotions in those two books rival other emotional literary works. J. I. Packer describes so well the grieving person. He or she is “overwhelmed, stunned, frightened, devastated, transported—by the intensity of our feelings of surprise, pain, fear, love, and joy.� (p. 144) The pain is so great and so numbing that words cannot describe it. Even to try to block it out of one’s mind is only a temporary salve, as the loss seems to come all of the sudden, like a large ocean swell that swamps a person under water.

I feel a semblance of this when I think of Brian’s life and death. But how much more Brian’s mother who has lost her husband and son in a matter of a few months. Grieving is a process, one that can take quite a while to come out of. Some never recover fully, and maybe it is not something a person should recover from. Instead, the Christian must come to the place that in the midst of suffering, a person must come to see that even that suffering has a purpose.

J. I. Packer’s book is a look at Richard Baxter’s (a Puritan pastor) own view of grieve, as he mourns the loss of his wife. Packer also does an overview of C. S. Lewis’ book, A Grief Observed, an overview of Lewis’ reflections after losing his wife Joy to illness. So Packer’s book is no mere glossing over grief with pseudo-sympathy. It is a book meant to deal with the reality of death and life and bereavement over such loss. So in conclusion, as he reflects on this loss, he exhorts the reader:

I wanted you to see something of the Christian way of handling grief that bereavement brings. The secular grief counseling of today is little help here. Secular theory commonly expects the bereaved to feel rage at their loss and to be angry with God, if they believe in God, for letting it happen. Secular theory seems to suppose that Christians expect their faith to shield them from suffering, pain, all forms of loss, and in particular the death of anyone they care for, so that they will feel bereavement as a threat to their belief and an occasion for panic anger, in which they question, “why?� will become a stone thrown at God repeatedly. No doubt some self-styled Christians feel and act like this, but such reactions are not biblical or Christian any more than is the idea that the life of faith will be trouble-free. Richard [Baxter] models the Christian path through grief when he reaffirms, to himself as well as to his readers, the good, the wise, and just sovereignty of God. This is the meaning of his echo of Job 1:21: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; and he hath taken away but that upon my desert, which he had given me undeservedly near nineteen years. Blessed be the name of the Lord.� (p. 172)